Aymen M. Khalifa is the editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Civil Society, published by the Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies in Cairo, Egypt.
Once again, a reformist electoral victory has been followed by political setbacks. The key to understanding this paradoxical pattern lies in the unique theocratic constitutional structure of the Islamic Republic.
In power since 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seemed as if it might be losing its hold when Turkish voters went to the polls…